This essay traces the development of the right-hand inscription (zuoyouming 座右銘) from its birth in the second century CE through its culmination as a complex literary subgenre in the tenth. Over the course of these eight centuries, right-hand inscriptions were used by some of the most prominent poets of their respective eras, including Cui Yuan…[Read more]

Register at https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jyEzkIZYQZ6bKzjjr3faZg :::: The University of Chicago East Asia by the Book! Author Talks is proud to present a book launch of Alexa Alice Joubin’s Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press). Chair: Haun Saussy (University of Chicago). Discussant: Michael Saenger (Southwestern…[Read more]

Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford, 2021) explores distinctive themes in post-1950s Asian-themed performances and adaptations of Shakespeare. In this Snapshot, Alexa Alice Joubin discusses the book and the importance of wider research into Global Shakespeares.

COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of a group of people based on their perceived social value—in the United States in the cultural and political life. This article that analyzes the language of racism and misogyny. It also offers strategies for inclusion during and after the pandemic. Racialized thinking is ins…[Read more]

Western observers often attribute Chinese suppression of undesirable information to state crackdowns on dissidents, pervasive censorship apparatus, and even self-censorship. For contemporary Chinese citizens under a certain age, Tiananmen Square protests allegedly did not happen. The PRC leadership’s private lives are shrouded in secrecies, m…[Read more]

Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. There are five striking themes surrounding cultural, racial, and gender dynamics. Gender…[Read more]

Four themes distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theaters from works in other parts of the world: Japanese innovations in sound and spectacle; Sinophone uses of Shakespeare for social reparation; the reception of South Korean presentations of gender identities in film and touring productions; and multilingual, disability, and racial…[Read more]

Scroll down to read the Korean, followed by English, versions :::::: COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of a group of people based on their perceived social value—in the United States in the cultural and political life. Offering strategies for inclusion during and after the pandemic, this article analyzes the his…[Read more]

Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature’s reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled…[Read more]

Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

This chapter, “Owning Chinese Shakespeares,” pursues the critical concept of localization and critiques the fidelity-derived discourse about cultural ownership. How were Chinese Shakespeares used as a kind of staged utopia of modernity?

Underlying this study are three related lines of inquiry united by what might be called locality criticism, t…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]

Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

Asian Americans have been spat on, verbally assaulted and physically attacked in more than a thousand race-related incidents in the United States as a result of fear evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Alexa Alice Joubin, professor of English and international affairs, women’s studies and East Asian languages and cultures, provided a historical c…[Read more]